


A Further Addendum to the Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

by greenbirds



Category: From The Mixed-Up Files Of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler - E. L. Konigsburg
Genre: Gen, a story about brothers and sisters, and also about friendship, come for the epistolary fic stay for the history lesson, in which i am unexpectedly wholesome, its even sort of a christmas story, let's not talk about how many tabs i had open to write this, no really
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:47:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,084
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21836974
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greenbirds/pseuds/greenbirds
Summary: On the Monday before the Thanksgiving school break, Jamie Kincaid received a package in the mail.
Comments: 28
Kudos: 90
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	A Further Addendum to the Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

**Author's Note:**

  * For [merely](https://archiveofourown.org/users/merely/gifts).



> ... who asked, "So for the entire book Claudia and Jamie are partners in this huge adventure – Claudia is driving the bus, for sure, but Jamie is helping navigate too – and then they just… go home? HOW DO YOU GO HOME AFTER THAT." 
> 
> I didn't quite expect to write more than 11,000 words on the subject, but here we are. 
> 
> *
> 
> Meanwhile, Napoleon Solo and Ilya Kuryakin - whose names come up later in the story - were characters on _The Man from U.N.C.L.E._ , a popular TV show during the mid- to late- 1960s, when this story (and the original novel) are set. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_from_U.N.C.L.E. 
> 
> (Incidentally, the same actor who played Ilya now plays Ducky on NCIS ... and now I bet you can't unsee it. You're welcome.)
> 
> Likewise 'Boris and Natasha' refers to a couple of characters on the animated TV series _The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle_ , which the children might have watched on ABC on Sunday mornings. Boris and Natasha were caricatures of Soviet spies, and the two villains were forever trying to catch Rocky and Bullwinkle ("Moose and Squirrel"). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Rocky_and_Bullwinkle_and_Friends#Characters
> 
> * 
> 
> Anyway, enjoy!

_To my lawyer, Saxonberg:_

_Dearest Saxonberg, I find that even a week later it remains impossible to decide whether I am flattered or insulted that you marched in here with such an accusatory tone and implied that I must have been responsible for ‘That Package’ which your grandchildren received over Christmas, and about which you are just now finding out on account of some rather odd friendships that Claudia and Jamie have developed in the neighborhood._

_In the first place, that seems like rather a lot of effort for one woman of my considerably advanced age to expend; in the second, if the artifact is indeed of genuine provenance, how on Earth would I ever have come by it? You are of course always welcome to avail yourself of my files in service of discovering the truth._

_In any case, no one was hurt and something nearly priceless – to its owner at least - found its way back to where it belonged after almost fifty years. If a bit of adventure was had in the process, what’s the harm?_

_But since Claudia and Jamie told me all about what happened when they were here over their school holiday, and because I know you’ll worry yourself half to death about the details otherwise, I suppose I shall relent and tell you. In this file, you’ll find everything I know about ‘That Package’ and what came after._

~ * ~

One thing you will discover should you ever have a proper adventure, dear Saxonberg (and I note, yet again, that it would really do you some good to have one before you shuffle off this mortal coil), is that what looks like the beginning of the story is usually actually the middle of the story. And the tale of the mysterious package is really no different. It began, in fact, well before the package ever showed up in the mailbox of a certain little house in Greenwich.

It really began when Claudia and Jamie came home from Manhattan, although at the time even our protagonists didn’t think of it as a beginning. Really, it seemed like an ending. Like the world had undergone some seismic shift and nothing would ever be the same again. That’s what coming home so often feels like. 

Oh, at first there was all the fuss Claudia could ever have wanted. Weeping parents, ecstatic siblings, breathless questions from schoolmates about what had happened in New York and how on earth they had managed to hide for a week in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and were they all right, and what felt like a million hugs from their mother and their usually-rather-uptight grandfather (that would be you, Saxonberg), and even an interview with a lady reporter from the local paper. 

Their mother took them shopping to replace the underthings they’d left in New York. Their father garnished their allowance for two months and grounded them until the end of the school year, but he looked at them with such fondness and relief when he meted out their punishment that it was hard to feel especially terrible about it. 

And of course for months their littlest brother Kevin always demanded to be Claudia’s “’sponsibility” on the way to school so that he could hear the story of New York and Angel and Mrs. Frankweiler and their ride home in the limo over and over again.

But just as it always does, Saxonberg, life slowly returned to normal. 

In the face of the demands of keeping track of a family of four children and a father commuting by train to work long days in the City, close maternal scrutiny waned and eventually subsided. Even their brother Steve tired of lording his own good behavior over them and mostly went back to ignoring his peripatetic siblings.

Their fame at school soon faded to a certain pride of ownership, especially among Jamie’s fellow third graders, and when Peter Thompson, who was in Claudia’s grade, pitched a no-hitter at the Little League World Series, Claudia and Jamie Kincaid were forgotten entirely. Fame is a fickle mistress, really. That’s why I have always avoided it. 

Claudia went back to emptying wastebaskets and doing her homework and going to music lessons. Jamie, once his allowance was restored, returned to playing War with his friend Bruce every morning on the bus. For a time they managed to convince themselves that there was nothing better than sleeping warm in their own beds and bathing in a warm bathroom and having clean underthings that weren’t gray. 

There was a certain novelty, at least for a while, in being just – ordinary – once again.

But there’s a problem with having had a proper adventure, Saxonberg, and it’s a thing – never having had one yourself – that you wouldn’t understand. Once one has tasted goblin fruit it’s terribly hard to content oneself with apples from the corner grocery.

Spring gave way to an interminable summer vacation filled with all the usual things: popsicles and extra music lessons and trips to the library and to the shore and a bit too much television, and for Claudia, babysitting the next-door neighbors’ three year old twins every other Friday so that the twins’ parents could go out to dinner.

Jamie entered contests and saved cereal box tops to send away for prizes and read The Great Brain and learned new ways to cheat at cards (and perhaps I should not be telling this last part to his grandfather, but there you go). At his request their mother enrolled them both in art appreciation lessons. They checked out books about Michelangelo and the Renaissance from the library.

They made a trip to the City to see Angel. It was somehow less special with their mother looking over their shoulder.

But things didn’t get _really_ difficult until school started in the fall. That was when Jamie started fourth grade and Claudia started seventh. Seventh grade meant junior high, and junior high meant that meant she and Jamie now went to different schools, on different buses, at different times. 

And much as neither of them wanted to admit it (even to each other), Jamie missed Claudia, and Claudia, Jamie.

Oh, they’re good children, Saxonberg – running away aside - and they made a gallant go of it. Claudia joined the glee club with her friend Mary and started confirmation classes at church. Jamie and Bruce hatched half a dozen business ideas and finally settled on buying gift wrap and ribbons at the five and dime and selling them door-to-door at a ten-cent markup. Both did their homework more-or-less dutifully and took turns with Steve keeping an eye on their littlest brother Kevin.

But by Halloween Jamie was sneaking into Claudia’s room in the middle of the night to perch on her hard little desk chair and talk until the sky turned pearly gray and they were both exhausted when they had to drag themselves out of bed for school. At first they talked about New York, and about Angel. But eventually their conversations turned to the subject of further adventures.

It is to their credit, Saxonberg, that they both understood instinctively something that it takes most grown people many years to learn: that once an adventure has been had, any attempt to recreate the experience is futile. They discussed – and quickly discarded – the notion of returning to New York.

“Even if we stayed somewhere else, and picked something else to learn about and ate all different food, it just wouldn’t be as good,” Jamie said morosely, propping his chin on his hands at Claudia’s desk and rocking her wastebasket back and forth with his toe.

“Don’t you dare tip that over,” Claudia said halfheartedly as she nodded in agreement.

By November, their talk had turned to Los Angeles. The city, as they’d seen watching _Columbo_ with their parents, seemed glamorous and terribly exciting. And sunny, which Greenwich most certainly was not in November. It would be expensive to get there even if they just took a Greyhound bus, but that was all right: needing to save so much money would give them plenty of time to plan. And they would write to Mrs. Frankweiler. She’d been more or less everywhere; surely she knew something about L.A. 

And perhaps the planning would make the rest of well, _everything_ , seem a bit less intolerable.

They’d just started using their library time – at Claudia’s insistence – to find out all they could about Los Angeles when That Package came in the mail.

~*~

The package arrived on the Monday before the Thanksgiving school break along with a flood of pre-holiday mail: catalogs for JC Penney’s and Sears and circulars from local stores and a handful of early Christmas cards and a stack of bills that Mrs. Kincaid frowned at before tossing them on Mr. Kincaid’s desk in the study. And the package. It was an innocuous looking small box wrapped in brown paper with a typed label addressed to Mr. Jamie Kincaid at their home address. It looked like it was probably yet another cereal-box prize or maybe something from a contest he’d forgotten he entered.

Once he’d finished his after-school snack, Jamie picked it up from the kitchen table and took it back to his room to open. He got as far as removing the wrapping paper, at which point he stopped, folded the wrapping paper carefully, and shoved the paper and the box under his bed.

It was all he could do to wait until Claudia got home from glee club practice.

~*~

And it wasn’t, as it turned out, until almost bedtime that Jamie got the chance to talk to Claudia in private. Privacy and free time are two things that can be very difficult to come by in a household with four children on a school night. Mrs. Kincaid had wanted Jamie to help Kevin with his schoolwork and Claudia had spent half an hour on the phone with her friend Mary after supper (supposedly they were talking about their history homework but really they were talking about Christine Nichols and Jeffrey Rogers), and they would have spent even longer had Mrs. Kincaid not demanded the phone to call her sister Joyce about Thanksgiving dinner.

But Jamie finally got his opportunity when Claudia, dressed in her pajamas and wrapped in her favorite robe, headed back to her room to read after she finished her bath. Like someone in a spy movie, Jamie leaned out of his bedroom door, grabbed Claudia’s arm, and dragged her inside. She stared at him with both her eyebrows raised as he shut the door firmly against curious parents and nosy little brothers.

“Whatever you do, Claude, keep your voice down,” he said, and dragged the package out from under his bed.

“That must be some cereal-box prize,” Claudia said, folding her arms impatiently. She was reading _A Wrinkle in Time_ and when she’d been called down to set the table, she’d left Meg and Charles Wallace facing It on Camazotz. The focus of Jamie’s excitement looked like any other ordinary box to her, wrapped in brown paper with a typed label. Surely whatever he was so excited about could wait until morning. 

“It came addressed to me on the outside,” Jamie said, shoving the box into her hands. “But there was wrapping paper _under_ the wrapping paper. And Claude, _read the address”_

When she did, Claudia nearly dropped the box. Because you see, Saxonberg, it was addressed

TO THE FRIENDS OF THE MUSEUM

at the post office box they’d rented what felt like a thousand years ago in New York City.

Claudia and Jamie stared at each other, wide-eyed. “I suppose, Sir James,” Claudia said when she found her voice again, “that you’d better open the package.” 

“As you say, Lady Claudia.” Underneath that second layer of brown kraft paper was an old cigar box printed with pictures of birds and tied shut with a bit of twine. Jamie used his school scissors to cut the twine. He held the box away from him and opened it as though it might be a booby trap in a James Bond movie. Claudia would have laughed at him, but her heart was hammering just as nervously as Jamie’s.

But nothing happened. They leaned over and peered inside the box. 

Inside the box were three things: a letter on onionskin paper tucked inside an air mail envelope with no return address, a heavy gold locket adorned with delicate filigree and tiny stones, and a folded scrap of thick, time-yellowed paper.

The drawing on the paper, when Jamie and Claudia unfolded it, looked like this: 

Oh, of course _you_ know what it is, Saxonberg. You have the benefit of age and a college education. To the children, the two-headed eagle with its crowns was a complete enigma.

The letter, being typed in plain modern English, was less so.

 _Dear Friends of the Museum:_ (it read),

_This is addressed to you because you have already demonstrated your resourcefulness in the matter of the angel statute, even if your thinking was not especially novel. You see, I find myself in the awkward position of needing a favor. There are places children can go, and sudden interests that children may develop, that would inspire comment and scrutiny in a grown-up person. The matter in which I am about to embroil you concerns a very great secret and thus must arouse no comment at all, and certainly no scrutiny._

_Your task is a simple one: to return this locket to its rightful owner, from whom it has been separated for far too many years. I promise this shall require no great hardship on your part as its owner is quite close at hand, and that in this package and in your surroundings you have all the clues necessary to identify her._

_Your first clue, of course, is on the piece of paper that accompanies the necklace._

_I should be much obliged if you can complete this task by Christmas._

_Yours,  
Nobody in Particular_

When she’d had a moment to recover, Claudia took the locket in her hand. It was heavy the way her mother’s and Mrs. Frankweiler’s good jewelry was heavy, and the stones didn’t look like the stones in costume jewelry. It must have been worth a small fortune, even by grownup standards, let alone the standards of her meager weekly allowance.

The part of Claudia that was very good at following rules knew that she and Jamie ought to turn the whole thing over to an adult, or perhaps even to the police. How could they possibly be sure that such an expensive piece of jewelry hadn’t been stolen? And how did the letter-writer know that Jamie and Claudia Kincaid and the ‘Friends of the Museum’ were one and the same, let alone how to find them in the wilds of Greenwich, CT? They hadn’t talked about _that_ part of their adventure with the reporter who’d come to interview them for the paper.

But holding the locket in her hand gave Claudia the same agreeably shivery feeling she’d felt the first time she’d laid eyes on Angel at the museum.

She knew they _should_ turn the necklace and its accoutrements over to a grownup, but she also knew in that moment that they weren’t going to. Instead she opened it. Inside was an old-fashioned black and white photograph of a little girl in a fancy dress with lots of lace, holding a little boy on her lap. The girl had dark hair and dark eyes and an impish smile. She looked like she was seconds away from making a face at the camera. The little boy had hair that was probably sandy-colored and was wearing a sailor suit. He was looking up at his sister with a serious expression. It was clear that the two children in the picture loved each other very much.

For some reason looking at the picture made Claudia think of that first night at the museum sleeping side-by-side with Jamie in Lord Robert Dudley’s wife’s dusty sixteenth-century bed. She wondered what it would be like to be an old lady, with just a picture to remind her of how she felt about her little brother when they were kids. What if her little brother was dead and this locket was all she had to remember him by and it went missing? She felt a suspicious lump gathering in her throat. 

Claudia closed the locket carefully and gave it a little squeeze. She took a deep breath. “Someone must really be missing this,” 

“Yeah,” Jamie agreed. He looked uncharacteristically serious. Claudia wondered what he’d been thinking about. “I think we better make sure it gets back to the person it belongs to.” 

“To whom it belongs,” Claudia corrected absently. Jamie made a face at her.

~*~

Their first stop, of course, was to be the library. That’s the place one goes when one has a complete mystery on one’s hands. That’s where they’d gone when they mystery of Angel had presented itself, after all. But they weren’t to get there until after Thanksgiving. Tuesday meant school and music lessons, and by Wednesday morning, when there was no school, Mrs. Kincaid’s preparations for Thanksgiving were in full swing. Even though Trudy, the lady who came in once a week to help Mrs. Kincaid clean the house, was already there, all the children – even little Kevin who kept dropping things – were nonetheless drafted to scrub and dust and polish and organize.

And when the last piece of newly-polished silver was set aside there was _still_ no hope of escaping to the library. 

“I need you two to go to the bakery for me and pick up the rolls and the cake I ordered,” Mrs. Kincaid said, rummaging in her pocketbook for a handful of bills. She had long since bowed to the fact that - ever since they’d come home from their jaunt in New York - it hadn’t been so much Claudia and Jamie as separate entities as it was Claudia-and-Jamie as a unit. (She supposed she ought to be glad they got on so well.) “And take Kevin with you – get him out from underfoot while I cook.”

They would have complained more except that day was unexpectedly sunny and the walk to the bakery wasn’t long, and furthermore they liked Mrs. Mikhailova, who owned the place, very much indeed. She was older than their mother but younger than Mrs. Frankweiler, with a cloud of short, curly dark hair and a ready grin. It always seemed like she had some secret joke to share, and even though Claudia and Jamie were well past the age at which one usually received free treats from the baker she always had a cookie or a bit of broken cake for each of them.

Really, the only fly in the ointment was that they had to take Kevin along. It was inevitable that the moment Mrs. Mikhailova said, “Hello, children,” Kevin would announce at the top of his lungs, “She talks just like Boris and Natasha. Doesn’t she talk like Boris and Natasha?” It was embarrassing.

Not that Mrs. Mikhailova ever seemed to regard it that way. She leaned across the counter, regarded Kevin solemnly, and intoned, “Moose and squirrel.” 

Kevin dissolved into gales of laughter, and even Claudia couldn’t help but grin.

~*~

Their first chance at visiting the library free from the scrutiny of grownups came on Saturday, once various family members had dispersed back to their respective homes and the aftermath of Thanksgiving and a brace of houseguests had been tidied away. Mr. Kincaid had gone to play cards at the Elks’ Club and Mrs. Kincaid meant to go Christmas shopping with Mrs. Trimble from three doors down.

Kevin wanted to go to storytime at the library just like he did _every_ Saturday, and he wasn’t about to be deterred. Claudia and Jamie, sensing opportunity, met one another’s eyes across the breakfast table and came to a wordless agreement.

After Mrs. Kincaid had attempted, unsuccessfully, for the third time, to explain to her youngest that schedules were often different around the holidays, Claudia spoke up. It wouldn’t do to appear too eager; that would only arouse suspicion. 

“Jamie and I can take him, mom.” She hoped she sounded appropriately unenthused. “I finished my book and need to return it anyway, and Jamie has his school project.” Claudia didn’t actually know for sure that Jamie had a project, but there always seemed to be something school-related that he’d put off until the last minute so she _probably_ wasn’t lying. 

“Oh would you dears? That would be such a help.” Mrs. Kincaid kissed Claudia quickly on top of the head and started to clear away the breakfast dishes. Jamie grinned at Claudia across the kitchen table.

~*~

That trip to the library turned out to be a particular hardship for Jamie. Claudia was upstairs helping Kevin pick out his clothes when Bruce knocked on the front door. Bruce was lugging a big ugly blue, green, and white flower-printed plastic tote of his mother’s that was stuffed to bursting with tissue paper and wrapping paper and ribbons. And a new addition – packets of cheap Christmas cards.

Jamie’s heart sank when he saw his friend. Before school had let out for the Thanksgiving break, he and Bruce had planned an all-out sales blitz on the neighborhood for the weekend after Thanksgiving. They would even offer to wrap people’s fresh-bought Christmas gifts for a small fee. They’d spent the bus ride home that Monday (which seemed to Jamie in that bright particular moment to have taken place at least a hundred years ago) plotting what they were going to do with all the money they were going to make. Bruce wanted a shiny new horn for his bike and a whole lot of bubblegum cards. Jamie planned to save most of it, but he might see his way to buying a few ice cream sundaes and a comic book or two.

In all the excitement over the letter and the locket, not to mention the chaos of a family Thanksgiving, Jamie had forgotten all about it. 

Bruce was grinning. “So, pardner. You ready to go get rich?” 

Jamie couldn’t look at his friend’s smiling face. Instead he looked down at his stocking feet and scuffed a toe on the doormat. There was a hole in the big toe of his sock. Claudia had already scolded him for it at breakfast. “I can’t go today,” he muttered in the direction of his holey sock.

“Oh, baloney! What do you mean you can’t go? You said on Monday you could. You said you’d even asked your folks.” 

“I gotta help Claude take Kevin to the library for storytime. Mom can’t take him today.”

“Why can’t _Claudia_ take him and you come sell wrapping paper with me like we planned? She’s in junior high – plenty old enough to walk to the library with Kevin all by her own self! Jeez, Jame. It’s like you two are joined at the hip these days or something.” 

Jamie stared at his toes even harder. 

“C’mon, pardner. Think of all the money we’ll be making. Moolah. Dinero. Clink-clink, clank-clank. Gotta be better than the dumb ol’ library any day.” 

And oh, Jamie was tempted. And he hated the thought of hurting his best friend’s feelings more than he’d probably hated anything else before in his life. But that locket looked important, and looking at the picture in it made him inexplicably sad. And whoever had written the letter was trusting THE FRIENDS OF THE MUSEUM to return the locket before Christmas. “It’s not just Kevin,” he finally muttered. “There’s something important I gotta help Claude with at the library.”

“What?”

“It’s a secret.” Jamie hunched his shoulders reflexively because he knew Bruce was going to blow up.

Bruce did not disappoint. The amount of time Jamie and Claudia spent together had been a sore spot with Bruce ever since they’d come back from New York. “Of COURSE it’s a secret! It’s always a secret! It’s always you-and-Claudia this and you-and-Claudia that, and ‘I can’t come ride bikes with you because I’m doing something with Claudia’!” Bruce kicked the doorframe hard enough to leave a mark. He bruised his toe, which just made him madder. “Look, Jame, am _I_ your best friend or not? Or is your stupid sister?” 

Don’t be too hard on Bruce, Saxonberg, not even in your own mind. Bruce only has the one sister, and she’s not quite three and destroys all his things. He really couldn’t be expected to understand. 

Jamie felt his hands balling up into fists. “SHE’S NOT STUPID!” 

“That’s what I thought!” Bruce threw the bag of wrapping paper and ribbons at Jamie and stormed off in the direction of his own house. The bag fell over. Rolls of ribbon spilled out. A few of them bounced down the porch steps. Scrubbing a forearm across eyes that were suddenly watering for some reason, Jamie stopped down and started to gather them up.

When Claudia came downstairs with Kevin a minute or two later, she took in the scene and frowned. “I thought I heard shouting. What happened?”

“Nothing,” Jamie said with a look that _dared_ Claudia to ask more questions. Claudia shrugged awkwardly, and patted him on the shoulder. When Kevin started to say something, Claudia silenced him with a quelling look.

“I guess you can tell me later if you want to. In the meantime, Sir James, shall we away to the library?” She held out her arm.

“Lead on, Lady Claudia.” Jamie tried hard to sound like his heart was in it.

~*~

With Kevin deposited safely at storytime in the back corner of the children’s room, Sir James and Lady Claudia had the run of the library for an hour. But that proved to be as much curse as blessing, given that they really had no idea where to begin searching for the meaning of the two-headed eagle. They wouldn’t have known where to start even with the miniature card catalog in the children’s room, and faced with the immensity of the _real_ card catalog, they found themselves at an utter loss.

If either one of them had learned enough about European history in school to know something about coats of arms they might have had a fighting chance, but as neither of them had yet reached eighth grade and their first course on World History, was they might as well have been looking for a microscopic needle in a mile-high haystack. Claudia felt her heart sink.

At least with Angel they’d had somewhere to start. And a nice anonymous librarian they could ask. Here at home in Greenwich most of the librarians knew their mother, and if Claudia and Jamie started asking strange questions one or another of the librarians would undoubtedly say something to Mrs. Kincaid. 

After wasting a good ten minutes opening card catalog drawers more or less at random, they finally settled for paging through the _Encyclopedia Britannica_ in the reference room, hoping to stumble across something that looked like the picture on the scrap of paper that came with the locket. Jamie would start at ‘A’ and Jamie would start at ‘Z’ and they would meet in the middle.

If only they’d begun at ‘R’, Saxonberg. They might really have gotten somewhere. 

By the time storytime was over, Jamie was halfway though volume ‘C’ and Claudia had gotten distracted reading an article on the Yiddish language.

Vanquished, they got to their feet and collected Kevin from the children’s librarian. Each of them holding one of Kevin’s sticky hands, they shuffled home.

~*~

So utter was their defeat that Claudia and Jamie didn’t look at the necklace again for almost a week. To deter the prying eyes of parents and nosy brothers Jamie had wrapped it up in an old sock and stuffed it in a mostly-forgotten shoebox full of green plastic toy soldiers under his bed, and there the locket remained until the following Thursday, determinedly ignored by a couple of very dejected children.

Claudia started having dreams where dark figures came in the night and stole Jamie away, no matter how hard she tried to stop them. In the dreams, when she tried to find a picture of Jamie to give the police, she discovered that all the photographs of her brother had disappeared from the house. She contemplated handing the locket over to her parents and letting them call the police, or whatever it was grown people did in a situation like this

Bruce wasn’t speaking to Jamie, not even to play War on the bus. So Jamie spent his time actually doing his homework for once, and watching _Man from U.N.C.L.E._ with his brothers, and trying to be mad at Claudia (which was difficult when it was three in the morning and he couldn’t sleep). He even played cars with Kevin in the den a couple of times. Mostly he was bored, and trying as hard as he could to ignore what he knew was stashed under his bed. 

But the siren song of the locket was much like Angel’s. (Do you know, Saxonberg, what it’s like to be faced with a mystery that simply will not let you rest until it’s solved?) By Thursday night, once the rest of the household was safely asleep, they found themselves sitting on Claudia’s bed conferring in whispers. He’d already given up the pretense that he was mad at his sister. It was hardly her fault that Bruce had acted like a big jerk.

While they talked in circles about how they could possibly solve the mystery of the eagle without giving away their secret, Jamie turned the locket over and over in his hands. With so much handling, it was inevitable that his fingers would eventually discover the tiny letters incised around the outer edges of the locket. Claudia was talking about how they could maybe get to a college library and ask one of the librarians _there_ when Jamie blurted, “Claude, I think there’s _writing_ here!” 

Claudia straightened hopefully. “Maybe it’s a clue we can use!” 

They squinted at it in the dim glow of Claudia’s desk lamp, turning the locket this way and that to catch the light, but the delicate letters were too small and too faint to make out properly. Another dead end. Of course it was. Claudia set the locket on her desk rather more forcefully than she needed to and sighed. Some adventure _this_ was turning out to be.

“Dad has a magnifying glass in his desk in his study,” Jamie suddenly remembered having seen it when he went to take the mail to their dad a couple of weeks ago.

“And a really bright light,” Claudia agreed, jumping to her feet. “Sir James, you are a _genius._ ”

~*~

With the aid of a magnifying glass and the light at their father’s drafting table, they managed to make out the inscription. It was hard to decide what it meant, since it wasn’t in English. It didn’t even contain many letters the children recognized.

But it was still, as Jamie pointed out, another clue. He copied down the letters very carefully. They looked like this:

возлюбленная Анастасия

“It looks a little like Greek,” Claudia said, squinting at it. There was a Greek dictionary in the room at church where Father Norman taught the confirmation class. But that was as far as they got. Someone was stirring upstairs. The children switched off the light, and shutting the door to the study behind them as silently as they could manage, scurried back to their own beds before they could be caught. 

Claudia thought fleetingly of those evenings hiding in the bathroom stalls at the Met.

~*~

As it turned out, the inscription wasn’t Greek. Many of the letters weren’t even in the Greek alphabet. Claudia returned home from her confirmation class as defeated as she’d been hopeful when she left the house. Yet again, they were back at square one. Less than two weeks until Christmas and they didn’t even have a name to go with the locket.

That Saturday, Mr. Kincaid took the children to cut down a Christmas tree. It was a family tradition, with a stop at a little roadside café for hot cocoa and off-key Christmas carols sung in the car, and a snowball fight to celebrate the felling of the _perfect_ tree. Mr. Kincaid told Jamie that Jamie could invite Bruce along if he wanted. Jamie said that Bruce’s mom wouldn’t let him go because Bruce had gotten a D on Friday’s spelling test. Bruce really _had_ gotten a D, but the truth was that Bruce _still_ wasn’t speaking to Jamie even though they sat next to each other in class.

And Claudia was uncharacteristically subdued the entire trip. Normally Christmas tree hunting was Claudia’s very favorite part of the season. She was the loudest Christmas carol singer, and relished the parentally-sanctioned opportunity to peg her brother Steve in the face with a snowball. But this year her heart wasn’t really in it. When Mr. Kincaid asked her what was the matter, she just shrugged. Mr. Kincaid put it off to Claudia’s being thirteen. It was one of those ages, after all, and junior high was tough. 

But Claudia was really thinking how little time they had left to find the locket’s owner, and how they were off cutting down a Christmas tree when they were still so far from having solved any of the clues.

On the way home, Jamie reached across the back seat and squeezed Claudia’s hand. _Don’t worry_ , he tried to say to her with his eyes. _We’ve still got time to figure it out._

~*~

Ironically, it was Jamie’s fight with Bruce that saved them in the end.

It was the day before school let out for the Christmas break. Mrs. Johnson, the fourth-grade teacher, had been summoned to the office over the PA system and left the class alone for a few minutes. The children were supposed to be reading silently, but I think we both know too much about nine-year-olds – especially nine-year-olds well-aware of the proximity of Christmas - to assume that’s what the students in Jamie’s class were actually doing. If Jamie and Bruce hadn’t been fighting, they probably would have been playing cards, but Bruce was drawing a picture of a race car and Jamie had his copy of the inscription on the locket out on his desk and was staring at it morosely, as if looking at it long enough might enable him to read the mysterious letters. 

Had Jamie and Bruce not been fighting, Bruce never would have done what he did next.

Bruce looked up from his drawing, saw his ex-best friend staring at the little scrap of paper, and snatched it up off Jamie’s desk. “What’s this, another secret with your best friend _Claude_?” 

“YOU GIVE THAT BACK!” 

“Oooh, must be some secret with your dumb older sister.” Grinning, Bruce jumped up on his desk chair and waved the paper just out of Jamie’s reach. By now the whole class had turned around and was staring at them.

“GIVE IT BACK OR I’LL PUNCH YOU!” And Jamie, his face red and fists balled up at his sides, might very well have done just that had Mrs. Johnson not picked that moment to return to her classroom.

“Bruce Horton! James Kincaid! I don’t know what on Earth has gotten into the two of you, but you can either sit down at your seats right this instant or you can report to Principal Butler’s office. And if you think you’re going to recess after lunch, you two have another think coming!”

~*~

There’s something about spending a lunchtime detention together cleaning erasers that builds a sense of solidarity among the punished, even if the penitents are two boys as determined never like one another again so long as they both shall live as were Jamie and Bruce.

They’d managed to go most of the detention period without talking to each other, partly because Mrs. Johnson looked up from her grading every so often to glare them into silence, but finally Mrs. Johnson looked sufficiently absorbed in what she was doing for Bruce to dare a whisper.

“So what’re you and Claudia doing with a piece of paper with Russian writing on it anyhow?” 

If Bruce had asked _anything_ else or even made a profession of forgiveness and eternal friendship, Jamie might have been able to carry right on ignoring him. But Bruce had just asked the one question that Jamie Kincaid could not possibly ignore.

“What would you know about it? You can’t even pass a spelling test in English.”

“Shhhhh. Do you want Johnson to come over here? I know it’s Russian because my grandpa’s Russian.” 

“Oh, Baloney.” Mrs. Johnson’s head briefly lifted, and Jamie made a show of going back to clapping erasers as noisily and efficiently as he could. When she finally went back to her grading Jamie’s whisper was much quieter. “Okay _Boris_ , what’s it say then?” 

Bruce shrugged. “I dunno. I don’t know how to read Russian. I just know what it looks like.” Bruce gazed at Jamie with sudden understanding. “You don’t know what it says, do you?”

Forlornly, Jamie shook his head. “No idea.”

At that moment, Bruce had a rather intoxicating feeling. Do you know that feeling, Saxonberg? Of being _necessary_? Of being unexpectedly important to someone who has lately treated you as rather, well disposable? And young Bruce knew precisely what to do with that feeling. “Tell you what. We can take it to my grandpa today after school. On one condition: that you let me in on whatever crazy secret you and Claudia have been keeping.”

~*~

It took most of the school bus ride for Jamie to explain the situation to Bruce. The roar of the other students’ shouts and laughter, Jamie figured, provided good cover for a top-secret briefing. The whole time, Jamie was contemplating what Claudia was going to do to him when she found out he’d told. But it wasn’t as though he had any choice. Tomorrow was the last day of school before the Christmas break, and they were hardly any closer to solving the mystery of the locket than they had been when they first opened the package. What was even worse was that from the number of times Bruce said, ‘ _Baloney_ ’, it was clear that Bruce thought he was making the whole thing up.

Jamie supposed that in Bruce’s shoes, he wouldn’t have believed him either. “Look, if your grandpa tells us what this says, I’ll _show_ you the package and the locket. Deal?” It wasn’t like Claudia could possibly kill him any more than she was already going to.

“Okay, Napoleon Solo. You have a deal.” Bruce held out his hand.

“How come you get to be Ilya Kuryakin?” Jamie grumbled as he shook Bruce’s hand. “Napoleon is boring.” 

“Because I’m Russian and you’re not,” Bruce said with a grin. Jamie had to concede the point.

~*~

They got off the bus at Bruce’s stop and stopped at Bruce’s house long enough for Bruce to put his book satchel in his room and for Jamie to call home and tell Mrs. Kincaid where he was. Fingers crossed firmly behind his back, he swore there wasn’t any homework he needed to do that night. It was just a few math problems and he figured he could do them in the morning on the bus. He’d make Bruce let him, since it was Bruce’s fault they were here in the first place. Mrs. Kincaid made him promise to be home by dinner, but she said that Jamie could stay.

“Come along, Napoleon,” ‘Ilya’ said, after they had finished a snack of milk and Christmas cookies furnished by Bruce’s mother. “It’s time we were off on our mission.”

“Yeah,” Jamie agreed, with a meaningful glance at Bruce’s little sister Barbara, who was heading determinedly in their direction with a doll tucked under each arm. “Before THRUSH gets us and drags us off to a tea party.” 

They pulled on their coats and hurried out of Bruce’s house as quickly as they could manage, with Bruce’s mother shouting futilely after them not to slam the door. I don’t know what it is, Saxonberg, about little boys and slamming doors. Were you ever a door-slammer? Inquiring minds want to know.

At any rate, Bruce’s grandpa – his _dedushka_ \- lived in a little block of walkup apartments a few blocks from Mrs. Mikhailova’s bakery. “Lots of Russian people live here in this neighborhood,” Bruce said, delighted to know lots of things that Jamie didn’t. “My grandpa says a lot of them moved here after the Soviets took over in Russia. My grandpa takes the train to Stamford with a lot of them on Sundays, to go to church at St. Mary’s Holy Assumption. I’ve gone with him a couple of times. People stand up the whole time and most of the service is in Russian. It’s pretty boring.” 

Jamie was only half-listening, wondering if the owner of the locket lived here in this neighborhood with Mrs. Mikhailova and Bruce’s grandpa, less than a mile from Jamie and Claudia’s own house. The author of the letter that came with the locket _had_ said that its owner was “close at hand.” 

But that still left a whole lot of people, and they didn’t have a lot of time left until the deadline.

~*~

Bruce’s _dedushka_ was a shortish, smiling man with a bald head, thick glasses with black plastic rims, and lots of white whiskers. His apartment smelled of cigarettes and fried potatoes and black tea and was full of threadbare but comfortable old furniture and overstuffed bookcases.

His kitchen was dominated by an enormous copper container with a chimney and a tap. Jamie thought it looked a little like a water cooler, but couldn’t imagine what it was for. Bruce’s grandfather grinned when he noticed Jamie’s interest, and insisted on spending the next five minutes explaining about the _samovar_. “The most important thing in a Russian house, ya? Because without it we have no tea!” 

Jamie practically squirmed with impatience, but Bruce trod on his foot before he could say anything.

Eventually _dedushka_ wound up his story, and there was tea and a snack of sweet pastries called _plyushka_ and little cakes stuffed with cherry jam and sprinkled with sugar. “So you are this Jamie that my Bruce has told me so much about. The one who went to Manhattan and stayed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Your parents must have been worried half to death.” 

“I guess they were, sir,” Jamie said, feeling a little tongue-tied in the face of such directness. It’s a Russian thing, Saxonberg. Quite normal. But it does make a lot of Americans dreadfully uncomfortable. My late husband used to loathe it; he’d always treasured the notion that we New Yorkers were the most direct people in the universe. 

“And what brings you here, Jamie of the Met? Bruce doesn’t usually bring his friends to meet his old _dedushka_.” The man’s tone suggested that he wished Bruce would. 

Jamie, his mouth full of _plyushka_ , chewed and swallowed as quickly as he could without choking. “Uh, I was hoping you could translate something for me.” Suddenly he realized he was going to need some kind of explanation, and groped for a plausible story. “My … uh… cousin. She bought an old, um, bracelet, at … uh…”

“A pawnshop,” Bruce supplied, and Jamie shot him a look of pure gratitude. It was probably in that precise moment that their friendship was re-sealed. 

“Yeah, Jamie agreed. “A pawnshop. And it had an engraving on it in Russian. And, um … my cousin’s interested in history, and was wondering if the engraving could, uh, tell her something about it. Bruce said you might be able to translate it.” Jamie shoved the scrap of paper with the Russian words into Bruce’s _dedushka_ ’s hand before the old man (who was, it must be admitted, looking a bit skeptical) had a chance ask any questions Jamie couldn’t answer without giving away secrets.

The old man frowned a bit, but he pushed his glasses up on his nose and studied the paper. “It says _vozlyublennyy Anastasiya_ ,” he said. “It means in English, ‘beloved Anastasia.’” His eyes were suddenly sharp with interest. “How old is this bracelet, and where did you say your – ah – cousin acquired it?”

Jamie Kincaid hadn’t felt so trapped since that night in the bathroom at the Met when the security guard had nearly caught him. “I … she … uh … Oh, gee, look at the time. I promised my mom I’d be home twenty minutes ago, and she’s going to _kill_ me. C’mon Bruce!” 

Jamie pelted down the stairs to the street like either the police or agents of THRUSH were after him. He could hear Bruce panting behind him but he didn’t slow down until he got to the corner. 

When Bruce finally caught up with Jamie, he shoved him, hard. “What’d you go and do that for, dummy? Now my grandpa is going to think all my friends are rude and crazy.” 

“What was I supposed to do, _tell_ him? The letter pacifically … specially … _specifically_ said we were supposed to keep grownups out of it.” 

“Well what am _I_ supposed to tell him? He’s probably calling my mom right now.” 

Jamie shrugged helplessly. “Tell him I’m rude and crazy I guess. I hope I didn’t get you in too much trouble with your family.”

~*~

They separated at Bruce’s house, with a promise that Bruce could come over and see the letter and the locket tomorrow after school.

Before trudging home to tell Claudia what he’d done, Jamie backtracked far enough to make a stop at Mrs. Mikhailova’s bakery. He was pretty sure that he’d seen _plyushka_ and cherry _pirozhki_ in the glass cases near the cash register, though he hadn’t known what they were until the visit to Bruce’s grandfather’s apartment. Maybe Claudia would be less mad at him with a belly full of delicious Russian pastry. It would mean parting with some of his precious pocket money, but he figured that was better than certain death. 

Mrs. Mikhailova apparently intuited something from the expression on Jamie’s face while she rang up his purchase. “I never see you in here without your sister,” she said, her kind eyes searching her face. “What happened?”

Jamie shrugged uncomfortably. “I did something I think she’s going to be pretty mad at me for.” Unlike Claudia, Mrs. Mikhailova didn’t correct his grammar. Jamie found that made him unaccountably sad.

“Ah,” Mrs. Mikhailova said, and added a couple of extra pastries to his bag. “Apple _pirozhki_. No charge. To help you apologize. Or for you to eat if she won’t forgive you.” Her expression was oddly wistful. “I had a little brother like you. Always looking for trouble. Always _getting_ in trouble. But I adored him, and I never could stay angry at him, no matter how terrible the prank he played. He had a golden heart. I think your sister cannot stay mad at you either. So go home with your pastries. It will all be all right, I think.”

Mrs. Mikhailova’s expression was so tender and so sad that Jamie wanted to ask her more about her brother - about what had happened to him, because Jamie was certain something had – but before he had the chance a woman towing a little girl in pigtails by the hand stepped up to the counter to ask Mrs. Mikhailova about a cake.

~*~

Claudia was indeed furious about _l’affair Bruce_ and did not so much as _look_ at Jamie for the rest of the night. She still wasn’t speaking to him the next morning at breakfast, though she ate a couple of the _plyushka_. But by the time Bruce came over after school, her relief at having a break in the case at last led her to relent enough – after saying some choice words about how secrets stopped being secret when one shared them - to speak to both boys, and even to split her remaining pastries with them while Bruce looked at the locket and the letter.

“I guess we can let you in on it,” Claudia said to Bruce, who was still a little wide-eyed. He hadn’t believed Jamie about the package or the locket or the letter, not really. “But you have to be _all the way_ in, and that means helping with the parts that aren’t so much fun, not just coming around when we’re doing something you think is neat.”

Bruce frowned for a moment, because Claudia sounded an awful lot like his mom, and what she was proposing sounded an awful lot like actual _work_. But he’d missed Jamie more than he wanted to admit (even to himself) when they’d been fighting. So maybe a little work over Christmas would be all right. “Okay,” he said. “Sure.” And offered his hand so they could shake on it.

Claudia shook his hand a little awkwardly, and then studied him with a shrewd look in her eye. “I don’t suppose there were pictures of these two in any of your grandfather’s books?” Between the symbol of the two-headed eagle with its crowns, and the fact that the locket was obviously a piece of fine jewelry, she knew in her heart the owner had to be someone famous. She just hoped they were going to be easier to track down than the creator of Angel.

Bruce shrugged. “I dunno. I never really looked at his books.” 

“Typical,” Claudia said with a sigh. “And it’s ‘I don’t know,’ not ‘I dunno.’” 

Jamie and Bruce rolled their eyes simultaneously.

~*~

“I can’t believe we’re going to the _library_ on the first day of Christmas break,” Bruce groaned. He could think of at least fifteen things he’d rather be doing, starting with sitting in his living room in his pajamas watching TV.

Claudia was unsympathetic. “You’re the one who wanted to get involved. So yes, we’re going to the library. We still haven’t figured out what the eagle with two heads means.” 

Fortunately for Bruce (and for Jamie and Claudia), now that they were armed with a name and the knowledge that the locket’s owner was probably Russian, their library expedition was far easier and more successful.

The index of the Encyclopedia Britannica included a reference to _Anastasia, Russian Grand Duchess_ and that led the children to an article about Tsar Nicolas II, the last emperor of Russia, and his family. And right on the first page of that article was the two-headed eagle with its crowns. The coat of arms of the imperial Romanov family. Claudia felt goosebumps on her arms and the back of her neck. 

In the article, there was also a picture that looked very much like the one in the locket, except that the children were a little older and sitting next to each other this time. Grand Duchess Anastasia and her little brother, the tsarevich Alexei. Anastasia looked to be about the same age as Claudia and Alexei couldn’t have been much younger than Jamie. For some reason the picture gave Claudia a funny feeling inside her chest.

The picture made Jamie think for some reason of Mrs. Mikhailova. Since the thought made no logical sense, he didn’t say anything to Claudia or Bruce.

The boys sat quietly as Claudia read the article, sharing interesting tidbits aloud as she came to them. They were more fascinated than either of them wanted to say (reading the encyclopedia being an awful lot like _school_ ) by the story of the Romanov family.

Before the Soviets had been in charge of Russia, Russia had been ruled by a kind of king called a tsar, Claudia said, and Anastasia and Alexei’s father, Tsar Nicolas the Second, had been the very last of the tsars. Which made Anastasia and Alexei and their older sisters princes and princesses. They had grown up in a palace, though their parents had been strict with them and expected them to do chores and tidy their own rooms. (Claudia wondered privately if Anastasia had ever been forced to empty everyone’s wastebaskets). With Alexei being the youngest and having something called _hemophilia_ , the girls had all spoiled him, and called him “Baby.” (Jamie wondered if Alexei had complained about the nickname. He knew _he’d_ hate to be called Baby his whole life, no matter who it was calling him that.) Alexei liked to play pranks on everyone.

When World War I broke out, the two oldest sisters became Red Cross nurses, and the younger children spent a lot of time visiting the Russian soldiers, trying to keep their spirits up. Alexei joined his father at the front. 

“But then in 1917, the Russian Revolution happened and Tsar Nicolas abdicated the throne. That means he stepped down from being king,” she explained to the boys. “The Communists arrested the family and eventually locked them up somewhere called the Ipatiev House in a city called Yekaterinburg.” 

“What happened then?” Bruce demanded. 

“It says here that the entire royal family was murdered by the Communists in 1918,” Claudia said quietly. “That they made the whole family and their servants go down into the basement of Ipatiev House, which they called the House of Special Purpose, and then they shot them. Except that there have always been rumors that Anastasia escaped and is in hiding somewhere, because they never found her body.” 

“Do you think that the locket’s hers? That she came here to the United States? To Greenwich?” Bruce asked.

“That picture sure does look like her and Alexei,” Jamie added. “Why wouldn’t she have brought it with her? Did it get lost when she ran away from the Communists?”

Claudia couldn’t answer them. She found herself imagining what it must be like to be the only one left in her whole family, all alone on the other side of the ocean from the only home she’d ever known, without even a picture of her beloved little brother for company. Finally she had to to stand up, and turn away from the boys, and scrub impatiently at her eyes. 

“If she really is here in Greenwich, we have to find her,” Claudia finally said shakily. “We _have_ to.”

~*~

At least the Russian community in Greenwich was pretty small, and most of them – according to Bruce at least – went to his _dedushka_ ’s church. So Bruce swiped the church directory from his grandparents’ house. He brought it over to the Kincaid’s with him a few days before Christmas when he came to spend the night with Jamie while his parents went into the City to see _West Side Story_.

Claudia felt a surge of hope when Bruce presented her with the directory, until she saw just how many names it contained. Even if they eliminated everyone who didn’t live in Greenwich, that was still a _lot_ of people. They couldn’t even eliminate all the men, because for all they knew Anastasia was married to one of them.

“Not to mention,” Jamie said helpfully, “if Anastasia’s hiding out from the communists, she’s probably not going by her real name.” 

“What are we going to do, call all of them and ask if they’re Anastasia?” Bruce wouldn’t put it past Claudia. Or maybe she’d insist they all go door-to-door.

“Well, we can eliminate a bunch of people because they’re the wrong age and because they didn’t come to America from Russia. Anastasia was born in 1901. Which would make her … 57 this year, I think.” Claudia bit her lip, thinking. 

“But it doesn’t say any of that in the directory,” said Bruce. He would know. He’d studied it closely in the four days since he’d swiped it. There were no Anastasias, no ages, no information about who’d been born in the United States.

“Maybe we could go to the State Archives in Hartford. We learned about them last week in school. They’re open to the public. You can go there and look up _anybody_. So all we have to do is look up the women in the directory and find out who’s the right age and wasn’t born here.” It wouldn’t be much different than going to the library, Claudia supposed, except they’d need train tickets. 

“Three days before Christmas?” Jamie demanded. “Do you even think they’re open? And what are we going to tell mom and dad?” 

“Looking up all those people would take a really long time,” Bruce said. It sounded like the kind of project that was right up Claudia’s alley, though. It was enough to make him wish he’d never stolen that scrap of paper off Jamie’s desk.

So there they sat, Saxonberg, defeated on what seemed had seemed like the very cusp of victory. I am not sure there is any worse feeling in the entire world. They sat there until Mrs. Kincaid started hollering for them to come down for dinner, and then they sat there a bit longer, staring hopelessly at their collective shoes. 

And then something occurred to Claudia. But there wasn’t time to follow up on the thought. Steve burst through the door, a smug look on his face. “Mom says you three better come down to dinner right now or you’re going to get in _trouble_.” Steve sounded like he almost hoped they’d keep right on dawdling. I certainly hope you weren’t a Steve when you were growing up, Saxonberg. 

“After dinner we need to take another look at that letter,” Claudia said to Jamie on their way downstairs.

~*~

After dinner, the letter was duly unfolded, and studied by three hopeful pairs of eyes. Finally Claudia crowed with satisfaction. “ _There!_.” She pointed with so much enthusiasm that she almost punched the paper straight out of Jamie’s hand. “Jame, read that part.”

Dutifully, Jamie read. He’d read the words probably a hundred times by then, but he hadn’t really thought about them. Neither he nor Claudia had. _“Your task is a simple one: to return this locket to its rightful owner, from whom it has been separated for far too many years. I promise this shall require no great hardship on your part as its owner is quite close at hand, and that in this package and in your surroundings you have all the clues necessary to identify her.”_

“No great hardship,” Claudia said. “The clues are all in our surroundings. So we shouldn’t _need_ the church directory, or a train trip to Hartford. Jamie, I think they meant it was someone we _know_.”

“Wait, you already _know_ Anastasia?” Bruce thought this might be the most unbelievable part of the whole affair.

“Yeah,” Claudia said slowly, “I think we do. I think we visited her a couple of days after we got the package. She has to be about the right age…” 

“Who?!” Bruce couldn’t follow this conversation at all. It was like Jamie and Claudia were conducting half of it telepathically. 

“Moose and squirrel,” Jamie said in sudden understanding. “When I went in there the night we went to Bruce’s grandpa’s apartment, she told me she’d had a little brother. She seemed really sad about something.”

Jamie and Claudia looked at each other and grinned. Bruce, mystified, demanded, “WHAT?”

“Mrs. Mikhailova,” Claudia and Jamie chorused.

~*~

Christmas Eve morning dawned bright and clear even though the weather forecast had called for snow. After breakfast, Claudia and Jamie volunteered to go to the bakery and collect the cinnamon rolls for Christmas morning, and the desserts Mrs. Kincaid had ordered for Christmas dinner.

“You two have been such a big help the last few weeks,” Mrs. Kincaid said, half approving and half curious. “Really going out of your way.”

“Well, you know … Santa,” Jamie said awkwardly, even though his belief in Kris Kringle had been rickety since before second grade. Claudia just shrugged.

And at any rate, when they headed off to collect Bruce before they went on to Mrs. Mikhailova’s bakery, the slip of paper with the Russian Imperial Eagle and the locket were nestled in Claudia’s coat pocket next to the money to pay for their order.

~*~

The three children dawdled outside of the bakery until they could be sure they would be the only customers inside. With so many people picking up their Christmas orders, it seemed to take an eternity (though it really was probably only about half an hour; time runs so much more slowly for the young).

But finally the last woman and her little boy strolled out of the bakery and Claudia and Jamie and Bruce burst through the door. “Claudia?” Mrs. Mikhailova said in her heavy accent. “Jamie? Are you quite all right?”

“I need to pick up an order for my mom, Mrs. Mikhailova,” Claudia blurted, “but first, we … we’ve got something we need to give you.” 

“I do not need a Christmas gift, children,” Mrs. Mikhailova looked mystified.

Delicately, Claudia lifted the necklace out of her coat pocket. “It’s not a present. It’s something that I think belonged to you a long time ago.” She laid it carefully on the counter. It clinked against the countertop.

Mrs. Mikhailova picked the locket up with shaking fingers and studied it, and then opened it. And then she did something that surprised her three visitors completely: she clutched the locket to her chest, said something in Russian and burst into tears. “What did you …? How did you…? Who …? Oh, my sweet Alexei!”

“It’s kind of a long story, Mrs. Mikhailova,” Claudia confessed.

~*~

So Mrs. Mikhailova – “call me Nastiya; we’re friends now” – turned the sign in the window to ‘closed’ and locked the front door and took Claudia and Jamie and Bruce upstairs to her little apartment over the bakery and made them Russian tea with cherry preserves in pretty little glasses, and then she sat and simply listened while they told her everything.

“Alexei gave me that locket for my birthday.” Mrs. Mikhailova’s eyes were both tender and sad. “I wanted to stay at Ipatiev House with my sisters and Alexei, but when one of papa’s servants said he had a way to sneak me out, papa made me go. This servant promised he’d go back for the rest of my family, and he tried. But he didn’t make it back in time.” She paused for a moment and put a hand over her eyes. 

When she continued her eyes were suspiciously bright but her voice was steady. “The Bolsheviks – the people you now call the Soviets – were looking for me, so I couldn’t have anything on me that might give away who I was until I got out of Russia. So I gave the locket to someone I trusted to keep for me. We were supposed to meet in Germany, but I never saw him again.” She touched the locket as if she expected it to disappear. “I never thought I’d see it again.” 

“All I could think about – once I knew the whole story about your family – was how much you must be missing your brother Alexei,” Claudia said, and then was surprised by a sudden flood of tears. “How this locket was probably the only thing you had left of him, and how much you must want it back” 

Mrs. Mikhailova looked from Claudia to Jamie, and then set her tea glass aside, stood up, and went to gather Claudia up in her arms. Whatever it was she murmured in Claudia’s ear Claudia hasn’t told me and Jamie didn’t catch, but it made Claudia sniffle, and smile, and wipe her eyes with the back of her hand, and then hug Mrs. Mikhailova tightly. 

Once Claudia had recovered her equilibrium, Mrs. Mikhailova smiled around at the three of them. “Why don’t you come to my New Years’ party? You three. It’s when we Russians exchange our gifts instead of Christmas. There will be cake and treats and music. And,” she said grinning at Jamie, who was busily stuffing a fourth cherry _pirozhki_ into his mouth, “all the sweet _pirozhki_ you care to eat.” 

Claudia and Jamie and Bruce looked at each other, excitement and disappointment warring in their faces. Foremost in all of their minds was the same question: _What are we going to tell our parents_? Certainly the _truth_ was out of the question. And absent a good explanation, not a single one of them would be let to go.

As if she was reading their minds, Mrs. Mikhailova smiled her quick, impish smile. (The article in the encyclopedia had said that one of Anastasia’s childhood nicknames had been _Shvibzik_ , Claudia reflected. It was the Russian word for ‘imp.’) “Not to worry. I will make it all right with your mothers. You see,” she added with a wink. “I have a lot of practice at keeping secrets.”

~*~

_And so there you have it, Saxonberg. Thanks to your enterprising grandchildren – and Jamie’s friend Bruce – the locket found its way home to its rightful owner and Jamie and Claudia (and Bruce) discovered to their delight that the answer to their riddle had been right under their very noses from the beginning. Greenwich was perhaps not so mundane a place as it seemed at first glance._

_Oh, I know you well enough to know just what you’re going to ask me. Was she? Wasn’t she? Was it all an elaborate ruse cooked up by an eccentric and fabulously wealthy old woman – that would be me - to make two bored children happy?_

_So I will answer you with a question of my own: In the end, does it really matter?_

_As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “To find the journey’s end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom.” And isn’t life better with a bit of mystery?_

_Will someone else require the assistance of the Friends of the Museum at some later date? Who am I to say what the future holds?_

_At any rate, I would be delighted to discuss this matter with you at greater length if you will be so good as to join me at home for supper next week. My cook Yelena will make beef Stroganov. It’s said in certain quarters that this particular recipe came from the kitchen of Tsar Nicolas II himself._

_Yours fondly,  
Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler _


End file.
